Rain!
That’s all it seems to be doing, rain. But it only seems so because the body of past, memory, is shallow and what is recent is all there is. Rain!
And then the rain stopped and the sun came out. Well, you just never know, do you? Sun, rain, sun. That’s just the way it is until I stop counting the raindrops and the sunbeams. And you always know, day follows night, sun the rain.
Then I went exploring in the local bush and, rummaging in the grass trees, I found a bug. A few actually, but only one for here. A shield bug.
I picked it up and as I watched it sitting on my finger it shit, as all flying creatures do just before they fly off, then flew off, as anticipated.
I found another and put it on a fallen log and there it sat for a few minutes and I got a few decent shots. Not bad, I think. Lovely colour, and magnificent architecture.
Someone said they tire of seeing bugs up close but that’s just the loss of ability to see anew the wonder of nature. Tired of wonder, beauty, mystery, is tiresome, my self in the ascendant.
You’ve got to wake to the vital. By an act of will when the tiresome is upon.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Golden Wonder
This fellow didn’t just evolve, he is created, now, and evolves in time. There is the mark of his maker in him and it is beautiful, now. Beauty is in but uncontained by the form, and there is only one in – inside. There is no doubt about that unless you want to think and get clever. The fact is it is a beautiful and magnificent creature, and he stopped still long enough for me to show him to you.
Do you see him? The wondrous intelligence behind the form, as the form. Who says where is god when such things be. They just don’t see.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
The Light at the end …
… of the tunnel.
The pain of dissolution. Letting go.
Acceptance.
Ant Heaven. Honey on a leaf.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Fly at Sundown
It has been cold at nights in Brisbane and there is not much to shoot at all in most of the places I know.
Went for a walk in the bush, by a dam in Mt Cotton, where the late afternoon sun hits a clearing in the woods on the eastern slope while all else is in shadow, where I know some creatures go for the last of the day’s heat.
This fly became friendly after a few minutes following ‘him’ around, climbed on my finger and wouldn’t go away, seemed to get some nourishment from dabbing his mouth parts on my skin.
A little pleasure to me.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Moon Light
Rain has swept the land for a while now. It comes in floods here and the creeks fill up accordingly. It is dangerous to be caught out in it. There are few enough bugs around but nothing at all after three days wet. Then the sun comes out and it is glorious, lovely soft sunlight sparkling off the still wet, cool ambient temperature. And all the live things take to the air in search of what keeps them going. Sounds like people, doesn’t it.
There are a few places where the creatures show themselves. Openings in the vegetation where there is enough of their breeding and feeding grounds nearby. They come out to hunt and mate and die. Sounds like people again. Are we so different? I don’t think so.
The only difference I see is the capacity to reflect on the past and so think. This thinking stirs the ground of the past, what the past is impressed on, emotion. This becomes the habit of being and so begins the trouble, but only for a while.
When the trouble is known as pain enough there is a way to get through, back to the inner sense that is always here now.
On the other side of pain.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Ant
This fellow and I crossed paths and at my insistence he became a guest for the night. Next day he was fed and watered and sent on his way, off into the great unknown. What a wonder.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Fly Soup
It seems there are fewer creatures to photograph now but really there are newer ones. Newer in the sense they are revealed by the absence of the more showy characters like the Dragonflies and other larger forms, though they were always there.
It takes the absence of the familiar to reveal the ever present beauty. Beauty being outside the condition of mind familiarity is – being ‘used’ to something – implying a continuity or repetition that dulls the intelligence to the perception of the new.
It’s why the new is often difficult to appreciate, and then we get familiar with it and the process starts again. Life breaks up any condition or position, of course – in the course of being in existence, where all is change.
The fly is one of these newer fellows and isn’t he a beauty, lovely colours and intriguing form. Capturing these fellows, cognitively and photographically, is a matter of focus. A focus of the will to see the new by letting go the familiar.
Being new. And this new being is always now, in sense to begin with, eventually out of sense but not in mind as thought or emotion. A very subtle and rare state of being within and behind sense that begins with the sensation in the body.
That’s called meditation, then being. And it can be done with the aid of a fly.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Spider Craft
Since winter has arrived – it’s all relative, there is less to shoot the camera at. Much of it is in or close to indoors, depending on the heat of the day. I must stress, it’s all relative, perceptually so as well as actually.
Downstairs where I live there is an open bathroom that isn’t used except on occasion and I leave it open to see what nature will bring. A few spiders have lived here as evidenced from the scattering of dead insect bodies discarded on the windowsill, all sorts of flies that have entered but not exited. It’s a veritable killing field. Other creatures come and go, the gecko, moths, wasps and of course mozzies.
Right now there is a small and very successful spider that locates under the window and above the bath and has as its shelter and hideaway a roof made of insect parts held together by a weave of spider silk at the centre of an elaborate web. Whenever I enter to inspect the place this one makes a b line for the shelter and I leave it to itself, probably informed by one of the many almost invisible strands radiating from the web. But if I wait a little while I often find another kind of spider patrolling the window pane.
*
This one is a character, fiercely unselfconscious in his proud dance across the glass, jumping this way and that, seeing what he sees to make him so. A roaming hunter this one. When I put my finger in his way he jumped on it and then off again as fast, testing what am I. A good question the spider never asks.
Up close it is apparent this one is in his prime, a sprightly gait, colourful fur, clear eyed and a somewhat playful manner the way he punches out with his paps – or front ‘arms’, as if engaging an unseen foe. A pugilist among his kind perhaps, or do I know him from somewhere else? As someone else?
I am always delighted when a god made creature engages with me in whatever degree, as long as it’s not a bite. It is touching, of a point inside where nature is one in all things. It’s a psychic thing, or psycho – spiritual, in that there is a recognition at some level of perception there is no separation as it appears ‘out’ here. And in that oneness there is a sense of wonder, of beauty. A sense. It’s got to make sense.
I don’t mind spider at all. God spider, spider god? What blasphemy to the rigidly religious mind, love it.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
What God Is
All things, it is said. And if this god is the simple power in and behind all things, and all things – what else could it be, then it is so, without doubt. The only question is how can I know god’s mind? And the answer has to be simple, leave the man or mind made out of my inner vision as much as possible.
That’s the rub, what’s possible can only be known where there is the willingness to give up all consideration, of anything. Only then can it be seen what remains. And what remains must be god made, surely. But what a task, to leave all consideration behind.
God is a wasp. The queen is guarding her nest against me intruding. Whenever I showed up she was out front and telling me ‘Don’t come any closer, I am dangerous” and, of course, I listened, up to a point. To get closer to her I had to visit her often to let her know, behind her fierce instinct, I am no harm to her. After a while, though she never gave up her expressive behaviour, she relented somewhat and I got as close as four inches for the purpose of capturing her image, only somewhat. The ferocity of instinct etched in her face and stance would never be abandoned since it is essential to her character, locked to the form of god being wasp.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Nature's Place 
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